DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There were many reasons why the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen ended without a binding agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

But one big obstacle to reaching an agreement is arguably the
ongoing, cleverly orchestrated and well-funded campaign of junk
science designed to mislead people into thinking that there is a
difference in scientific opinion about climate change.

It's not a particularly new tactic. The tobacco industry
perfected it years ago. They called it "manufactured doubt." In the
early 1950s, there was a spate of scientific reports linking
cigarette smoking to lung cancer that were starting to have an effect
on cigarette sales; people began to be concerned about the health
risks associated with smoking.

The solution was a simple one. The tobacco companies hired
one of the world's largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton,
to design a PR campaign to convince people that smoking was not
dangerous. They helped set up a organization called the Council For
Tobacco Research (CTR) that would produce science favorable to the
tobacco industry and call into question any independent, unfavorable
research.

CTR's work in delaying and reducing regulation of tobacco
products was outlined in a recent book, "Doubt is Their Product: How
Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health," by David
Michaels, the epidemiologist at George Washington University who is
President Obama's nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety
Administration.

Michaels wrote that Hill & Knowlton's strategy was simple.
"The industry understood that the public is in no position to
distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and
confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the
assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of
it, in the bargain."

Hill & Knowlton's strategies for Big Tobacco worked so well
that manufacturers of asbestos, lead, vinyl chloride, dioxin and
other products shown by science to be hazardous to our health
employed them to great effect. A new "science for hire" industry was
born to generate misleading information and false controversy. The
goal? To protect profits.

And so it goes with climate change. The oil and coal
industries have funded fake "grassroots" groups (known in the trade
as "astroturfing"), think tanks and industry front groups to
manufacture doubt about global warming.

Many corporate media outlets, too lazy to check out where
information is coming from or who's paying for it, uncritically
report the findings of these phony experts. They give equal weight to
the claims of the so-called "climate skeptics," the people who
believe that the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities
are not responsible for global warming, without pointing out that
this claim runs counter to the findings of nearly every reputable
scientist in this field.

Another recent book, "Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny
Global Warming," by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore, outlines
how widespread the disinformation campaign is.

For example, University of California professor Naomi Oreskes
researched 928 peer reviewed scientific journal articles published
between 1993 and 2003 and found not a single article took exception
to the fact that manmade releases of greenhouse gases were causing
climate change. Yet, despite the nearly unanimous agreement of the
scientific community, 53 percent of the stories that appeared in The
New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the
Los Angeles Times between 1998 and 2002 gave equal weight to the
statements of scientists and climate skeptics.

As Hoggan and Littlemore found, nearly all the "scientific
debate" about climate change largely happens outside of scientific
institutions, and the echo chamber created by think tanks, blogs and
media outlets sympathetic to the climate skeptics' cause helps
amplify the message of doubt and protects the profits of the fossil
fuel industry.

That's why we now have the manufactured scandal of
"Climate-gate" -- the information contained in 10 years worth of
hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of
East Anglia in Great Britain which has been embraced with such fervor
by the global warming deniers. They allege they provide the "smoking
gun" that some climatologists colluded in manipulating data. But the
truth is that these e-mails don't alter the huge body of evidence
that strongly supports the conclusion that modern climate change is
real and has been mostly caused by human activity.

Despite this huge body of evidence, all that the nations at
Copenhagen agreed to do was "note" the scientific evidence. There's
no road map to achieve what the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change says is needed to keep our planet's
temperature from rising by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this
century. Climate scientists say the likely outcome, even if the
Copenhagen commitments are honored, is that the world's temperature
increases by 3.9 degrees Celsius (or 7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.

Climate change is not only real, it is happening faster that
scientists predicted just a few years ago. At the same time, in just
the second quarter of this year, the fossil fuel industry has
outspent the environmental sector by a factor of 14 to 1 in lobbying
Congress. Lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry outnumber those
working for environmental, health and alternative energy groups by
more than seven to one.

That's why what we got in Copenhagen, as Naomi Klein summed
it up this week for The Nation, "was nothing more than a grubby pact
between the world's biggest emitters: I'll pretend that you are doing
something about climate change if you pretend that I am too."

That's why the rich countries weren't willing to reduce
their emissions significantly or pledge meaningful funding to help
poorer nations. And the poorer nations weren't willing to be sold out
for chump change, since this conference more or less assured that,
according to Joss Garman of the British branch of Greenpeace, we will
see "the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, droughts across South
America and Australia, and the depletion of ocean habitats" in the
coming years.

That's why this conference was a cruel joke for many of the
inhabitants of the places -- from fishing villages in the Arctic to
subsistence farmers in Africa to the low-lying island states of the
South Pacific -- that were left to die by the negotiators in Denmark.

That's why the doubt industry's efforts to discredit climate
science and obfuscate the issue may ultimately prove to be the most
deadly public relations campaign ever done.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for
nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade
Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com. For extra added
thrills, read his ongoing daily blog on The Harvard Classics.